


Only the soldered mouth

by lotesse



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant, Post-Canon, Rescue, Secrets, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/M/M, Torture, Truth Serum, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:02:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25338055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored.
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Luke Skywalker/Han Solo
Comments: 22
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

The fit of the grey uniform was poor, the tunic pulling too tight around Han's shoulders, the trousers bagging at the inseam. Had he been a superstitious man he'd have thought it a bad omen. As it was, he was just uncomfortable in body, as well as in mind.

Seven months since the defeat of the Empire at the Battle of Endor. Seven long months since the death of the Emperor. Why the damn Imperial Remnant couldn't give the fight up was beyond him. Himself, Han had been over it for long before the battles had ended.

*

Madine had presented the spynet intel in conference with the rest of the Alliance leadership: the Remnant was reportedly looking into biowarfare, getting close to developing a weapon. And plague was worse than any army, more random and indiscriminate in its destruction. You couldn't fight diseases with an ion cannon or ship's lasers. The loss of life had the potential to be enormous.

Madine dropped his eyes as Leia absorbed the blow, last princess of a murdered world, but Han didn't, and as he watched in silence Leia's face changed, becoming tight and tense, her eyes dark and sad. She looked like a statue, a beautiful marble representation of noble-hearted loss. He wanted to say something reassuring, comforting, but his mouth was dry and empty. 

*

Han ate with Luke and Leia in her quarters that nightcycle, which by rights should have been less formal than eating in the station's community mess hall but somehow ended up feeling even moreso. The space was all minimalist and bright-pale, Leia's coiled hair and Luke's dark clothes forming elegant accent points to one another; the yellow wine in their glasses was the color of Luke's hair before he'd stopped spending his time in the sun, back when he was still just a callow child of the desert backbeyond.

Somehow they'd picked up a family tie – although how that twist had come about was anybody's guess. It wasn't like you'd go looking for the twin brother of the Princess of Alderaan on a rim world. They didn't even look alike. 

Maybe there was a similarity in the way their lips expressed desolation, a resonance between their stubborn confident voices. He couldn't get either of them to tell him how they'd _discovered_ this startling new relationship. Maybe they were making it all up, because they were both lonely and needed someone to belong to. 

Hell, if they said they were twins who was he to gainsay them? He hadn't thought there would be any harm in it. But it was awkward, difficult, to get Her Highnessness to relax when her twin was always there beside her, perfect and solemn and productive and self-sacrificing. Made it hard to be much of a lover to her. Made being Luke's friend pretty hard too, because whenever Han pushed or pulled at the edges of Luke's depthless reserve, Leia was there to legitimate and need it. 

The kid still worshiped the ground the Princess walked on, Han knew. Becoming the princess' brother as well as her dearest friend had done nothing to abate Luke's burning need to rescue and protect and care for her. If anything, the situation there was worse than it had been when the kid had been eager to risk his all for her without even having met her face to face. 

“They won't hesitate to really use it,” Luke was saying, and Han dragged his attention from the abstract back to the concrete. “We daren't call their bluff. Think what the Empire's already done, and tried to do.”

“What do you propose we do about it, exactly?” he asked.

“I'll go,” Luke said. “I think I could neutralize it, maybe even destroy it. Could be able to save – ” 

The tension washed from Leia's shoulders. Luke's eyes were like the blue fire at the base of the flame, pale with the hottest heat, and Han remembered with a twinge that the only person more susceptible to Leia's pain than himself was Luke. 

Han didn't know which made him more jealous: that he never got that kind of reaction from Leia when he tried to help relieve her stress, or that he never got that kind of reaction out of Luke no matter what he did. But he loved watching the pair together, and hated it all at the same time. It was the way they satisfied one another's needs so perfectly, no room between them even for air half the time. Both composed, both productive: Leia almost singlehandedly rebuilding the fallen Empire's political infrastructure, Luke handling the most fraught negotiations, contacts, and interpersonal snafus. Fully functioning and more than. Terrifying, the pair of them, formidable in their quiet power; but not balanced, not good, not sustainable.

Mock-casual, the memory of all the times he'd accompanied Luke on exactly this sort of dare-devil mission hanging tangible over the table, he asked, “Want me to come?” 

Luke's mouth tightened. “I think I ought to go on my own,” he said quietly, his usual impassive tone re-engaged. “It would only be harder for me to cover for two. I'll be fine; I'm the Jedi, after all.”

Han had insisted to Chewie, once when he'd been good and in his cups, that Luke's – and Kenobi's, damn him, it was _Kenobi's_ – whole Jedi knight thing was a delusion of grandeur, spun of dead myth and fool hope. And yeah, Han has seen Luke do some pretty impressive – he'd have said _impossible_ once – tricks with his Force stuff. He still failed to see how telekinesis and precog translated into Luke being the last hope of chivalry or whatever shit the old man had shoveled into the kid's ear before he'd done them all a favor and gotten himself killed.

People treated Luke with distant deference, now, like something out of history or legend. Luke let them, never so much as blushing, his face always perfectly composed and serene, tranquil and utterly bland, unchanging no matter the circumstance. Han saw it unfolding like a terrible pattern, there in front of him over the remains of their dinner: yet another scene of Luke volunteering himself in expiation of all the Princess' worries, and all those of the Alliance, by substitution.

They parted early, as was becoming more and more common in their evenings. Leia kissed Han perfunctorily as he left, the touch of her lips sliding off to the left of his own. He didn't look back at her as she closed the door, and didn't watch Luke's retreat down the corridor to his solitary quarters either.

When the time came the next day he kept his mouth closed and waved goodbye to the kid's rear thrusters like all the rest, Leia standing silent and straight beside him.

*

They found out about Luke's capture two months later, at the same time as all the other Alliance brass, all of them efficiently briefed together: “We received a screamer from Jedi Skywalker, transmitting the details. He was on Bescane.” Bescane was very nearly the heart of Imperial space. There was no question whose hands Luke had fallen into. 

Mothma, quietly, inquired as to the effects of this new intelligence on the bioweapon situation, and Leia answered that they didn't know, they would just have to wait. For Luke to get word to them? Free himself? Self-destruct? Leia didn't look his way; her eyes were turned out the viewing portal, toward the brilliant points of the stars and the cold expanses of void that stretched between them. 

Han was more familiar with the sight of Leia in pain than he'd have liked. Her pain came at him in a mass of accumulated tiny bits and slices: disappointment in the blink of her lashes when he didn't lean in to kiss her, melancholy leveled at him like a weapon when he inevitably said the wrong thing, and underneath it all the wide rolling constant sea of grief that he'd hoped once, foolishly, to sop dry. 

Wartime had been their blessing, Leia's and his, letting them slide by on sheer animal desire. He'd never had an intention to be a courtier, had thought that the wartime egalitarianism that had brought him to her same level would continue after victory, obviating the need for class climbing. His mistake. Mon Mothma had told him the other day, in quite casual conversation, that if they married his official title would be “prince consort,” and Han had nearly choked on his own tongue.

Turned out it took more than sexual attraction to overcome massive differences in temperament, culture, class, and character. 

“I'll go for him,” he said, hoping it would be enough; but her brow didn't smooth, and her mouth stayed small and hard. “Leia,” he said, pushing for a reaction, and she raised her eyes to meet his.

“Then you'll be gone, too.”

“I'll bring him back,” he said. “I will. I promise.”


	2. Chapter 2

Chewie went with him, if only for the first leg. Once the actual infiltration started, only human operatives would be effective; but for a while Han had Chewie to fly the Falcon and keep his nerve up, and that gave him the freedom to do some serious thinking.

Leia was keeping secrets. Had been for a while now, maybe since before the end of the war. Han could tell it by the silences and lines that hung about her mouth, the signs of a weight of words unspoken. She didn't trust him enough to tell him whatever it was, and that stung him like iodine on an open cut. 

Then again, holding out on him seemed to be the new hot trend. 

Chewie was doing it, and Lando too – and where did Lando get off having secrets that Han didn't share, anyway? - but Luke, Luke was the worst of all. Who knew what was going on with Luke nowadays? Leia, maybe, but Han didn't think that she had it all. Artoo, probably, and wasn't that just a prime joke: the only person who knew the farmboy's secrets was his trusty astrogator droid. Like something out of a maudlin holovid. 

When they'd first met, Luke's most notable – and irritating – characteristic had been his complete lack of verbal control. Words had spilled out of him in an enthusiastic torrent of stubbornness and inquiry, sometimes so fast and so intense that his still-young voice had broken out into periodic undignified squawks. And Luke had wanted to talk _about_ things, too, back then in the early times in the quiet temple on Yavin, to share and confess and hear confession. 

He'd left that characteristic behind somewhere. By the time the Rebel base had been moved to Hoth Luke had grown up a little, sobered up and quieted down, but the irrepressible spark-like quality of him had remained intact. After Han had woken from the carbon freeze, though, things were different. Luke thought more than he spoke anymore, and when he did his language was careful and cool and controlled. He still took confession, dealt out absolution, but he did not confess.

Leia's secrets Han could quantify, approximate, by the level of tension she expressed, but the quantity of Luke's was unknowable. Maybe one, maybe a hundred. How much Luke was telling you of what was going on behind those soft blue eyes at a given moment was anyone's guess. 

It was driving him nuts. He didn't like indeterminate data; he was a hyperspace navigator. That was how you got yourself phase-shifted right out of existence, the jump to lightspeed the last thing you ever saw. 

Han had been thawed out of the carbon freeze by a slim knife of a man, dark and sleek and taciturn, who didn't need his help and didn't want his thanks. Who wandered in and out of Han's life without so much as giving notice, and that still stung the most, the way that all he'd known of Luke going to what would most likely be his death was a glimpse of Luke's shadow vanishing into the thick Endor twilight. 

So here he was, getting ready to put down on a slick overdeveloped overindustrialized Imperial holdout world, grey ferrocrete stretching as far as the eye could see. Breaking into yet another detention block, this time to haul Luke's idealistic ass out of trouble. Leia had set up the cover identity for him with her own hands, and Han should have been touched, but it wasn't a role he savored. 

His own youthful service in the Imperial military had been brief, exhilarating, and ultimately horrible. It wasn't a skin he had any particular desire to revisit. What a naïve idiot he'd been, ten times worse than Luke at his most childish, back then, to think that honor could be found in the halls and corridors of Imperial service. He'd picked up more tarnish and filth in those short years than in half a lifetime of lawless living. 

Leia had set him up as an Inspector-General. He would outrank almost everyone on the installation, and by coming in as judge and jury he'd be setting the Imps up to be psychologically subordinate to him from the get-go. They wouldn't want to seem less than helpful to the Inspector.

He tugged at the high shirtfront of the uniform, struggling with incipient claustrophobia. There was a reason why he preferred to wear his shirts open at the neck. 

Chewie rumbled a warning: _You'd better come back from this, Han. This is not a good moment for you to die. Please remember that._

“Don't worry about it,” Han said, trying for flippant but coming out brassy, more hollow than he'd meant, with worry and unhappiness lurking audibly behind his bright words. “I'll signal you when I've got Luke, okay? The beacon working all right?”

Chewie warbled an affirmative, and Han swallowed hard. “Time for me to go, Buddy.”

*

The air was acrid in his lungs, an unpleasant contrast with the stale-but-pure recycled atmosphere of his ship. Skyscrapers towered threateningly over him. The ground was hard and unforgiving beneath his feet. The high polished boots pinched his calves as he marched, military-straight, right up to the door of the planetary penal facility and flashed his papers. 

It wasn't far.

Han had never been this overbold when he'd been a smuggler; how had he not realized that living honestly was so much more dangerous than living crooked? Damn Luke anyway for getting himself nabbed. His “Jedi knight” business had been supposed to put a stop to this sort of thing, make him too strong and important to risk on the ground.

“Inspector-General Draygo,” the stormtrooper at the entry portal said, “Major Wallith expects you in the first conference room, sir. The MSE-6 will guide you.”

Han nodded, saying nothing. Maybe it would add to his mystique, maybe not, but lying was making him feel sick at the moment, and he didn't want to do any more of it than he had to. He followed the skittery little mouse droid to a lift tube that carried him up into the polluted stratosphere of this garbarge-dump of a world. Not that there were many windows looking out, even at the highest levels. The dark smooth shining walls ran straight from floor to ceiling like an   
insect's carapace.

“Major,” Han said, inclining his head at precisely the correct angle, “I believe you were expecting me?”

“Ah, Inspector, welcome to Bescane Centralized Containment. Your visit is an honor, sir.” Wallith proved to be the slicked-back-weasel type of officer, obsequious and controlled behind a glossy black desk. 

Han waved an imperious hand, brushing away the man's pleasantries. “The honor is mine,” he replied, holding a hard curb on his tongue, the precise clipped vowels of his core-world upbringing sounding clear without the drawl he usually used to soften and muddy them. He hated the sound and he swallowed the hate, and the edges of his words only grew sharper and clearer. He wondered, briefly, what Leia would have thought of the performance, so much like what she wanted of him but at the same time so morbid and horrible and wrong. 

He hadn't expected it to come rushing back like this, old feelings and patterns and behaviors and rebellions crawling up his throat like vermin to choke him. He swallowed. 

Use it. Remember what that boy had been like, the one who'd won his bloodstripes as a soldier of the Empire. Take the anger and hate and disgust and use it, because these people are all consumed by hate, it's what makes them tick, and you have to convince them that you're one of them. Become more like them by hating them. Ironic, perverse, but ultimately very effective as a tactic. 

“Your facility has a reputation for loyalty and dedication in the Intelligence Corp, Major,” he went on. “I look forward to studying your methods more closely.” 

Translation: you bastards have a reputation for cruelty and fanaticism, and I wish to all the gods of all the worlds I could turn my face and not have to see the sick shit you do here.

The corners of Wallith's mouth turned up ever so slightly in the intimation of a predator's smirk. “Would you like me to hold current interrogations until your arrival on the detention level? I had thought – perhaps my men would benefit from your guidance during what promises to be an interesting session.”

Han's stomach turned over queasily in his gut. 

“Sir?” Wallith said. 

Han wanted to bring the place down with his bare hands, tear down their walls and empty their cells and leave them bleeding in the rubble of their delusions and cruelty. But unlike Han Solo, Inspector-General Draygo didn't give a shit about anyone but himself. Maybe the rotting corpse of his dead Emperor, but Han wouldn't bet on it. Draygo'd never cared enough about another human being to risk himself for their sake, never felt the frantic worry that had been clawing at Han's insides ever since he'd heard that someone had managed to get the drop on Luke. 

If he wanted to pass for an Imp, he was going to have to numb out. Thoughts of Luke led to care led to compassion led to grief, and grief led to totally blowing his carefully-constructed cover. _Don't react. Don't react._ “Thank you for thinking of me, Major, that's a commendable attitude you've got there,” he said, voice level and neutral and empty. He surreptitiously leaned back against Wallith's desk and palmed an adhesive stealthtimer to its underlip. “I'd love nothing better than to take you up on that invitation.”


	3. Chapter 3

Neat lines of Remnant personnel first, light-skinned human boys lined up in a row like child's toys, each patterned after the other. Then, stores, computational banks, datacenters, comms networks. All black and gleaming and impersonal, infinitely replicated repetitions of material, plastic and metal and flesh. 

Han stayed quiet, letting the little corporal spout of statistics without comment. He wanted to tune them out, but instead listened carefully to what might turn out to be valuable information for the Alliance, committing rosters and rotations to the part of his mind that was always recording, remembering. He'd be able to give Leia some treats when he got home, at least.

“... and to finish the grand tour, so to speak, sir, our current prisoners of combat and other, ah, detainees,” the corporal was saying, polite and diffident and stupidly young, and Han's attention snapped back to the fore with vicious contracting force.

Five cells, five shadowed silenced occupants whose names he didn't know, who he wasn't going to be able to save this time, and then they came to an expanse of clear plastisteel. Behind it was a brightly-lit room, and people moving around inside it, muffled sounds coming through the transparent enclosure even before the door was unlocked and opened to permit their entry. 

“Well,” the corporal said, coming to a halt. “We've arrived in time, good.”

Han took in the details of the scene all at once, the gather-asses-decide rhythms of a life lived by wits and skin taking over. 

The cell was small and windowless. Industrial lights glared overhead, and the transparent wall gave the space a strangely naked atmosphere. A pair of Imps, one a grown man and one of them yet another of the fucking kids, stood in the far corner. The younger one had a stenographer's vidcorder in his hands. The older held a syringe that Han thought looked too damn empty. 

Their prisoner was slight and fair and hung suspended by his bound wrists, head hanging down so that the fall of dirty hair obscured his face. _Luke._ The word leapt to Han's lips but he bit it back, tasting blood as it welled in his mouth. 

They'd stripped off Luke's flight jacket but he still had his shirt, the white cloth dirty and sweat-stained but not – stars' fortune be thanked – visibly bloodstained. A tourniquet of polymer tubing wound around his left arm, and Han could tell that they'd already injected him with whatever had been in their syringes. 

It was unnerving to see the drugged passivity that characterized the twisting mess of Luke's spine, the bend of a back that usually ran straight as a hyperspace path. He hadn't seen this degree of helpless bodily surrender in Luke since that long dark night on Hoth, when the kid had been hypothermic and hallucinating and more than half dead, and Han had sat up through the long hours of the night cradling his body close and wondering what he would do if Luke didn't make it through to dawn.

No. Don't think about that.

“Inspector-General Draygo,” the little corporal guiding his tour said in introduction, laying heavy emphasis on the impressive title. 

Both Imps turned to look at Han, then. He entered the cell. His corporal saluted and backed away, not following him in. The older Imp put down his syringe, stepped forward, nodded in greeting. “Inspector-General,” he said. “I'm Captain Drees, and this my subordinate Corporal Lawal.”

Luke's eyes were closed; he didn't react to Han's presence. 

“I understand we're to have your supervision for the interrogation, sir?” Drees asked, clearing his throat. Han must've stayed quiet too long. _Pull it together, Solo._

Casting a glance at where the used syringe lay on a counter, Han said, “What were you injecting him with?” 

“Ah,” Drees replied. “Standard procedure. Chemical questioning obviates the need for so much time and labor, you know. Physical defenses are eliminated, psychological defenses are neutralized in every case, and the combination regressors and de-inhibitors make our task a really very easy one. Interrogators can be simple stenographers rather than trained psychologists; it broadens the potential personnel pool wonderfully. Ah. Sir.”

There was a bruise spreading out over Luke's right cheekbone, and his lip was cut and bleeding, red dripping down the cleft in his chin. His eyelashes fluttered, trembling, opening.

“Great,” Han said, stepping closer to where Luke hung suspended, hoping that Luke would look at him, recognize him. 

Instead, as his own angle of view changed, waves of hot and cold and sick washed over him; Luke's right hand was gone, his wrist and empty sleeve bound with a cord close enough to his remaining hand that the gross mutilation had not been immediately apparent. 

Red veils began to drop down over his vision. “Account for this,” he ground out, and the Imps turned to look at him with wide startled eyes.

He made an explanatory jabbing gesture at Luke's single, bare, curl-fingered hand, vulnerably pale and surprisingly – touchingly, painfully, appallingly – small.

“Sir?”

“Chemical questioning, you said. This man's been through an amputation.”

“An older injury, sir,” Lawal stepped in to explain. “There was a biorealistic prosthesis, which we have removed. I would estimate the amputation to have occurred at least a year ago. If you like, we can explore the information as part of our interrogation.”

“I – yes, perhaps. What are your primary targets, in terms of desired intel?”

“Unfortunately, this saboteur did manage to do some degree of real damage, tampering, I understand irremediably, with a high-level rearmament plan. Our primary goal is to determine how he knew of it, secondarily to learn what, specifically, he did to damage the – as I understand it – weapon he sidelined.”

So Luke had succeeded in his mission, before he'd been captured. Well, Leia would be happy to learn of that, at least. As for the interrogation – perhaps it didn't matter if these Remnant officers learned that Luke was a Force-user, and that was why he could do improbable things, but that primary intel goal would be damaging, if attained. He was going to have to figure out some way to protect the spynet, in addition to extracting Luke intact.

But – when had he been wounded so badly? “I wonder what happened to his hand,” Han said aloud.

And then Luke looked up, big dark drugged eyes focusing on Han's face. “A city in the clouds,” Luke said in the ghost of a whisper, and something in Han's heart lurched, because yeah, there was recognition in Luke's eyes, softening his tattered mouth. Oh, boy. The kid was awake.


	4. Chapter 4

Neither Luke nor Leia had ever been willing to tell him how the mess in Cloud City had ended. He'd known, before the carbonite closed around him and left him no knowledge but his own nightmares, that Luke was Vader's target – but he knew only that Luke had escaped, that Leia had escaped, that Lando had defected. He hadn't thought to ask for details in the haze and confusion of his rescue from Tatooine, and then later he'd felt strange bringing it up. Bespin had become an awkward silent ghost between them, unacknowledged, an uninvited guest.

Luke had been given regressors and de-inhibitors. The usual sky-blue of his eyes was almost swallowed up by black, the pupils blown wide and fathomless. “You were in pain,” Luke whispered, eyes wide and wild. 

Don't look, Luke. 

Please don't see me doing this, don't let me be that dishonored in your eyes …

You got the best effects out of regression drugs when you laid down little memory-paths to trap your subjects on them; ideally, you knew enough about whatever it was you were investigating to set up the confessions you wanted. The Imps were being much more indiscriminate than that, just throwing the drugs at Luke and waiting for his brain to start to dump itself – but they didn't have access to crucial information, and he did. 

It was a way to save them both, to convince the Imps that Luke was cooperating, that they were getting his secrets. 

He'd thought it often enough, watching the smooth cool surface of Luke's facade: if I could only get a hold on him, pin him down, mess him up and break him down and make him tell me. 

“If I may, Captain,” Han said, exercising the privilege of rank and shifting the interrogation into his own hands. Drees fell back without a peep, indicating that the scared, drugged Jedi bound in the center of the cell was all Han's for the taking, and for a moment Han was thankful for the rigid hierarchies of the Imperial Military. He echoed Luke's earlier words, “A city in the clouds?” 

“It was so beautiful,” Luke said to him. His voice was breathy, high, reedy and bending and weighed down. “I thought it was just my – the dream, but even when I got there – blue and gold, steam and clouds. Like something out of a dream – or a nightmare. It can't be true. It's – impossible.”

“What did you learn there?” Good, a neutral, open-ended question … 

“Father,” Luke breathed in the ghost of a whisper. 

“Father?”

“Vader,” Luke said, soft and sad and gentle, his mouth forming the name and then letting it hang in the stale recycled air, resonating. Had Han heard that right? He prayed that the Imps, at least, would think that Luke was just echoing his former word again – not confessing to something like _that_. Force above, in all of Han's worst thoughts, he hadn't thought of _that_.

Above them, the high squeal of an alarm cut the air. Imperial-issue bootfalls clattered. Looking down at his chrono, Han grinned savagely. Sounded like the timed stinkbomb he'd planted in Wallith's desk had just gone off. Not a moment too soon – even though Luke had said Vader's name, he didn't think their cover had been blown. The prisoner was out of his head, talking to figments of his overstimmed imagination, it was just the slurring of his slackened mouth, that sort of thing.

With hurried salutes, Drees and Lawal took off down the corridor toward the lifts. Whatever they might have heard, or not heard, Han was gratified that it did not seem to have been overly noteworthy to either the young one or the older one.

Han's little corporal, who still stood lingering outside of the cellblock, shifted uncertainly, not wanting to abandon his escort duty assignment but not wanting a black mark in his record, either. “Ah, Sir, I think I should probably – that's an all-sectors alert, I need to –”

Cutting him off – it was doing him a mercy, anyway – Han managed a gruff, “Very well, Corporal, I think I can protect myself against one chained boy without your assistance.” The corporal, relieved of the conflicting pressures of his various duties, nodded, gave salute, and then went for the lift in a hurried scuttle. 

Relieved to know that his cover ident was still intact, relaxing a little now that he could stop playing Imp, Han wasted no time in turning to Luke, once their inconvenient audience was gone. “Hey there kiddo,” he said, playing it cool. “You're a little tied up right now, but I can get you out of here no problem – especially if you work with me a little, okay? C'mon, Luke, pull it together.”

Putting his arms around Luke's ribs he shouldered the kid's weight, balancing him so he wouldn't fall when the binders around his wrists released. Luke was shaking. He pressed his face against Han's neck. Luke's toes dangled above the floor – never had grown tall, small and slight and boyish still. Luckily, the binders were ancient and more than half defective, and it only took a few seconds' worth of tinkering before Han had an armful of limp Skywalker falling on him all at once.

Han eased them both down to the cold floor, ending by sitting with Luke sprawled across his lap. Luke's left hand came up to clutch at Han's shoulder and it felt like a benediction, like forgiveness, like unearned trust. The other arm remained cradled against his chest, immobile and handless. 

“It's like the entire city's turned against me,” Luke said breathlessly, still months buried in time gone by. “It all obeys him. No matter where I go, he's there. No matter where I hide, he finds me. Ben told me – I'd be a Jedi when I confronted Vader. But – you are not a Jedi yet, he told me, and he's going to make sure I never am. Kill me or turn me,” he added with a slightly hysterical giggle. “Rule the galaxy – can you imagine me ruling the galaxy? I'd be terrible at it – he wants me more than he wants me dead, and I understand now why – if he wants me living, should I want to be dead? How can I want the same thing for myself that he does? Doesn't make any sense. I don't understand.”

“Shhh,” Han whispered, letting his hand come up to cup Luke's skull, fingers tangling in dark blond hair. He didn't want to hear this. He didn't want to hear it.

“It hurts so much,” Luke said quietly. Han could feel the wing-flutter of his lashes closing against his collarbone. “Didn't think, before, about what it would smell like when it burned. But it hurts so much. Father. How can he be telling the truth when he's hurt me this much? No,” Luke moaned, head shaking slowly from side to side. “No, that's not true. That's impossible.” 

Those words again, repeated exactly. Shit, shit, shit. “What's impossible, Luke?” he said, griping Luke's shaking shoulder.

Luke looked up at him, eyes still weirdly dark but almost lucid, almost present. “I didn't want him to tell me,” he said, quiet and abstracted. “Wanted to unhear it. Don't know what kind of father does that to – he'd cut off my hand, he couldn't be my father. He couldn't. Couldn't be true. That's why I let go.”

Except that it was true, Han was sure of it. All the truths in one word. His father. Darth Vader was Luke's father.

Thinking back – Luke on that Lambda-class shuttle - “Vader's on that ship … I'm endangering the mission, I shouldn't have come.” His father. He'd known, in that moment, who it was who was hunting them.

And his hand. The glove that never came off – the sounds of mechanical repairs in the medbay of the _Falcon_ after Tatooine, and the smell of blaster-burned circuitry. And Han hadn't known. The kid'd never said a word. Sith. Sith hells.

Luke's eyes rolled back, closed. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Could hold out against them. Harder with you.” Except that Luke hadn't been muttering anything of military or political value, not troop movements or cache locations or chains of command. Just his own terrible, personal secrets. 

Burrowing his face deeper into Han's shoulder, Luke muttered, “How can you still bear to touch me?”

“How can I – Luke, why wouldn't I want to touch you?” Shit, the drugs had messed Luke up bad. They must've given him a hell of a dose; he could see the words gathering in Luke's mouth, the pressure of the drugs pulling at his tight-shut lips.

“You touched my mouth, that night on Hoth,” Luke said. “Ben told me not to go, but he didn't tell me why. I don't understand why he didn't tell me. It would have been merciful, like putting down a massiff when it's born wrong. Blood will out.”

“We're getting out of here,” he growled. In the corridor outside another alarm went off ; this party needed to wrap up, fast. “You're going to have to hang in there, Luke.” Han stood, hefting Luke's resistless body over his shoulder. He wasn't heavy. “I've gotta get you out of here, okay? Just hang on, and it'll all be okay. You're going to feel a little confused, and I suggest you shut your eyes. Try not throw up on me – but it's okay if you can't help it.” 

Luke was going to be seeing double, past layering over present, and it didn't seem like either was terribly pleasant. Both at once would surely be even less fun than either one independently.

“Okay,” Luke whispered. 

At least there was a back way out. Not too hard to get to. And Chewie was still waiting with a landspeeder. This rescue wasn't totally blown. 

In his arms, Luke still trembled and shook.


	5. Chapter 5

When they made it to the rendezvous point, Chewie took one look at them both, then instructed Han to take care of Luke, and not to worry – he'd have them aboard the _Falcon_ in no time, and any Imps who dared follow them would be reduced to so much wakewash.

“Yeah. Take care of Luke and don't worry – that's getting into 'famous last words' territory, pal.”

Chewie asked him anxiously what was wrong with the cub. 

“Interrogation drugs,” Han said. “Pretty nasty too.” And then, quieter, “No one who represses as much as Luke does should be given regressors – it messes with the uptight ones most.” 

When he noticed that he was tightening his grip on Luke's shoulder he consciously loosened his fingers, swallowing down the inexplicable desire to stroke them along the delicate hollows of Luke's clavicles, to touch the loose fuzzy curls of hair at the nape of Luke's neck. Shit. They really didn't need this.

By the time Chewie docked them with the _Falcon_ Luke was the better part of unconscious, scarcely seeming to notice when Han picked him up again in his arms, carrying him back to the medbunk as Chewie got them out of the air. 

As Chewie asked what their destination was, Han could only wave him back to Leia, to the Rebel Alliance. He didn't have any more precise commands in him, just at that moment.

Instead, he started methodically cleaning the kid up, assessing him more carefully for damage besides the obvious bruises and depressor/hallucinogenics. He found a few scrapes and contusions; but overall Luke didn't seem to be badly hurt. The first thing that'd gone right that whole cursed day, Han thought. 

Only, his arm still hung stump-ended, the sleeve closing around the lopped-off wrist where the hand should begin.

Luke was coming around again, long pale lashes fluttering against stained cheeks. Opening eyes that were still overwhelmed by blackness, Luke managed to focus on him. “Han,” he breathed, low and pleased and almost happy. “Han.”

“You didn't tell me,” Han said, when he could trust his voice to come out steady. It still shook a little, and he hoped Luke wouldn't notice.

“I'm sorry,” Luke said, shifting suddenly into little-boy miserable, bleak and heavy, that simple happiness gone as if it had never been. “I didn't want you to know. I don't want anyone to know.”

Han could tell, by the slurring in Luke's voice and the look in his eyes, the fine tremors that still wracked his body, that the truth drugs were still acting on Luke's system. It wasn't over yet. The compulsion seemed to be less, though – Luke wasn't lost in the past, just a lot more talkative than usual. He wondered if he should go, leave Luke in quiet solitude to regain his self-control.

That would probably be the right thing to do, the ethical thing, moral. Han didn't move. Instead, he said, “I thought – we were supposed to be friends, Luke. I thought we talked. About things.”

“We were,” Luke told him, open and guileless and bleeding. “But you don't want me to touch you anymore either, Han – on Tatooine, remember? Convenient. It even made you angry when Leia got too close to me.”

That was more than Han wanted to deal with. Luke's words were setting all sorts of unpleasant alarms to jangling in the back of his mind, his stomach turning with something that felt uncomfortably like guilt that he didn't really want to look at up close and personal. 

Better to stick to his guns, hang on to the high ground by the skin of his teeth. “Doesn't change the fact that you didn't see fit to fill me in on anything that was going on with you.”

Resignedly, Luke admitted, “Nobody told me, either, until he did. I was just continuing the pattern.”

Han half-laughed. “Sounds like Vader told you plenty,” he said.

“He told me to tell Leia that I was right,” Luke said tiredly. “She didn't want to hear it.”

“Why Leia?”

“She knows,” Luke said, closing his eyes. “ – about father. I had to – she's my sister.”

Oh maker, he'd somehow completely forgotten that they were siblings. That meant – 

“Of course she doesn't want to be _his_ child. She's been trying to pretend like – like we aren't. She doesn't want to touch me anymore, not like she used to. Damaged goods. And I didn't even try to tell her the rest. She's got you now – the last thing she wants to hear from me is that I'm in love with you.”

Loved him? Hell and death. 

There he was, straining to manage Leia, to somehow turn himself into the nice man she needed him to be, and Luke always so damned calm and remote and mournful, and of course the kid was in love with him. 

Wasn't so long ago he'd expected Luke and Leia to marry, before they'd gone public about being siblings. If he was honest with himself, he hadn't been happy with the idea of the farmboy affiancing the princess, even before he'd gotten together with Leia. Because of course he'd been in love with Luke for years, even though there was no way in all the hells he'd ever have told him so.

Who didn't love Luke? He'd turn those big starry eyes up at you, look at you like you were a person – a good one – he was irresistible. The healed scarring from Hoth that'd changed his face away from its boyish handsomeness hadn't touched the kid's essential, magnetic charm.

“It was pretty traumatic, honestly, finding out about him. It's funny how beautiful the sky can look when you think you're going to die,” Luke told him, calm and conversational, drifting in the grip of the interrogation drug backwash. “There are worse things. It was the right thing to do, letting go of that gantry. I was glad when Lando and Leia and Chewie rescued me, but I didn't expect them to. I thought I was going to fall away through the clouds and the sunset, away out of the world and there would be an end to it.”

Han couldn't take it anymore – the mix of anger and guilt and compassion and resentment in his innards was going to make him sick. The walls of the _Falcon_ were pressing in on him – the weight of Luke's big blue eyes on him was pressing down on him. He had to get out. He should have gone ages ago.

Han rapped out a terse “I'm glad you didn't,” and very carefully did not slam or bang anything as he made his way forward. Infuriating or not, the kid was still a mess, and didn't need to be startled. He'd be okay by himself for a while. Sleep it off. Probably be glad to be spared any further self-incrimination. 

Chewie didn't say anything as they made their way back to Sullust, giving Han the space he needed to reform the universe that had crumbled around him over the last few hours.


	6. Chapter 6

It seemed like it took forever and a day to make it back to the Fleet; in relative time, totaling a mere handful of hours, but watching Luke in his uneasy sleep didn't make Han's hours pass swiftly. 

Lying there on the bunk, Luke looked listless and pale, disturbingly lifeless, and his words kept chiming through Han's head like horrible bells: _I let go, I let go, I let go._ But at least it wasn't urgent, now; the problem with Luke was chronic. He'd need rest, and time to finish metabolizing the drugs, but in body, at least, Luke wasn't currently an emergency.

Chewie docked them with the command shift, and Han could hear the airlock hissing even from the medbunk. “Chewie,” he called forward, “have them get a float pallet ready. Luke's gonna be out of it for a while.”

Answered by a Wookie yowl of affirmation, he bent to unwrap Luke a little. The kid shivered but didn't wake. Scooping Luke into his arms Han straightened, the slight weight curled against his chest at once strange and terribly familiar.

When he stepped through the airlock he saw Leia waiting for them beside an empty pallet, pale as snow, and he reeled back at the whipcrack of sudden rage that snapped through his heart at the sight of her. 

“Luke! You got him! Is he all right?” 

Her hair was pinned up in buns on either side of her head, not braided down. Must've been doing something that called for fancy dress rather than blaster pistols. Seemed like she usually was nowadays.

His words came out tense and bitten. “Oh, sure he's fine. He just got to relive a few years of secrets, is all. Seemed like it kind of took it out of him, can't think why, you tell so many secrets between the two of you.”

He knelt by the pallet, letting Luke down gently onto it, and as he did Leia rushed forward to grab at him. She reached out her hand toward Luke in an aborted caress, fingers grasping at empty air. “Secrets?” she said. “What secrets?”

The lies of omission were almost worse coming from her – worse because she was supposed to be his girl, wasn't she, and then again not quite worse because what could possibly be worse than Luke's solemn, sorrow-bitten silence? He hissed his reply, voice low; he would protect them both, still, despite their lack of faith. “What about his hand? Or the real name of his father? Yours? Something more I don't know about, because the nice Imperial truth drugs didn't happen to force Luke to spill quite everything, because I didn't interrogate him right? Who the hell knows, Princess?”

She looked for a moment like a statue, frozen out of all time and motion. “Truth drugs?” she whispered at last, the import of his words finally striking home, “They gave him truth drugs?” Now she knelt, letting her hand touch Luke's torso, above the first rib.

“Don't worry about it, Your Worshipfulness,” he said, throwing the words at her like laser bolts, sizzling with energy. “He didn't tell anyone anything not directly related to his own sithridden nightmares. You don't have to get scared about the kid selling out you or your precious rebellion – he'd kill himself first, apparently.”

That hurt her; he saw her flinch back from the wound. “Kill himself?”

“Or so he says. He tried it on Bespin, and again on Endor, from what I understand. You've done a nice job keeping track of your brother's suicidal tendencies, sweetheart.”

She gaped at him, mouth open in pained surprise. “I – you – you're blaming all of this one me? Han, you never asked him about any of it. You knew, before they put you into that carbonite, that Vader was coming for him. How could you not ask? How could you not notice, after all this time?”

How could he not notice? It'd been blinding, even when he was blind – that something was wrong with Luke, that something was harder in Leia. But, he'd thought, he couldn't do anything more than win their war for them. He couldn't make them say things they didn't want to say. 

“What was I supposed to ask, exactly?” he said. “Found any long-lost fathers recently?” It'd been so strange, reemerging from the carbon freeze into that different hard-edged sharpened world. 

She said nothing, still on her knees by Luke's still form.

He stepped close, deliberately making it a challenge, letting himself loom over her. “You lied to me, Leia, about everything that really mattered. How the seven hells do you think I can do anything without information, huh?” Leaning down, he prodded at her chest with an accusatory index finger. “He needed to tell me, and he kept it secret for you.”

“He made his choice,” she said. “I wouldn't have – ”

“Did you ask him not to say anything?” Han pressed.

“You can't – don't you understand why I would? That – the truth that that _monster_ was my father, our father – becoming known, it would have destroyed everything we fought for, Han, they never would have trusted me and – ”

“Maybe they'd've been right not to,” he said, voice twisting with bitterness. “Luke's got all kind of mumbo jumbo, who's to say you haven't been persuading us of all kinds of crap these last years, kriffing with our heads. Maybe you made sure I'd never ask him, Your Worshipfulness. Maybe you've been messing with my mind, Vader's Daughter.” 

She drew back and up, going cold and elegant as a midwinter midnight. “We've been coping without you for a long time, Captain Solo,” she said. “Your concern comes somewhat late. I sat beside my brother when they fitted his prosthetics. On Endor I said everything I could say to him to stop him from going after our father, while you flirted and joked and did nothing.” 

So she'd known it all, and had kept her mouth fastened all this time. She'd known, and had still refused to help the kid with it. Her concern was just more hypocrisy. “Should have known you'd never really trust me,” he said, savage. “Liars, both of you, so it's little wonder you can't find it in yourselves to have faith in anyone else.”

Her facade wavered, cracked a little; she was still pale as paper, but he could see something vulnerable edging round her dark round eyes. “You're not angry with him, are you?” she said entreatingly. “Please tell me you didn't say these things to Luke.”

She looked afraid, worried, and it was amazing how cut up he could still feel about her low opinion. “I would never do anything to hurt Luke,” he said.

She just looked at him, mute, sad-eyed.

“Look,” he said, unable to deal with the whole foul tangle any longer, “take your brother and take care of him – somewhere other than on my ship. The two of you have made sure that this is none of my business, so you'd better deal with it between yourselves. I've got nothing.” 

He cycled back through the airlock, went aft to check the Falcon's shaky motivator, and yelled for Chewie to get out there and bring him that hydrospanner. He emphatically did not watch Princess Leia leave him behind, pacing beside her unconscious sibling.


	7. Chapter 7

When Han woke the next morning in his shipboard bunk, mouth like dry cotton and shoulders aching indefinably, his first coherent thought was that Leia had picked a hell of a time to start listening to him. She'd left him alone the whole of the previous night and evening, and when he stumbled up to check his comm he found it devoid of messages. Which meant that either she was really incandescently pissed at him – or that something'd gone wrong with Luke, and she was too occupied with her twin to remember his existence at all. So much for his plans for sulking for a day or two.

He rose, dressed, cleaned his teeth. Stumbled into the galley for a scorching cup of caf. Chewie, tinkering with the main grav controls, leaned down and instructed him to give his good wishes to the cub. 

Han could only shake his head as he went out, and lament the day he'd become so transparent. Didn't matter what lies the kid had told him over the past months and years. Didn't matter how angry he still was with Leia. Stewing in his spaceship had been a luxury he could indulge, once, before he'd given in to his attachments.

What he really needed was to walk in and find Luke smiling, the way he'd still been able to smile in the medcenter on Hoth – but that was a tall order nowadays.

He made it all the way through the medcenter doors before he stalled out, not sure if he wanted to go in or run away. The Onebee droid on duty scanned his credentials and then waved him in, and Han had two thoughts in quick succession: he wondered if the heightened security meant that Luke still hadn't come down from the drugs, and also noted that it was gratifying that his name was still clearly on the “approved” list to access the kid if he was still in a vulnerable condition.

There was a privacy screen set up on the far side of the bay, a starry view drifting by outside the transparisteel porthole beside it. Han lingered for a moment outside the curtain, and when the fabric shifted in the recycled air currents the image of them together stayed burning in his mind: Leia sitting crosslegged at the head of Luke's bed, Luke curled up in her lap with his eyes closed and his mouth soft, relaxed and sated and serene in the wash of his princess' love and attention. 

Han swallowed. It was a good thing that they were making each other happy. “Leia,” he said, and it came out husky and rough. “He woken up yet?”

She nodded; her eyes, miraculously, stayed soft, even when they fell on Han. “He was up all morning,” she said. “His system's clear, and he's back to normal. Four Onebee says he'll be completely recovered with a bit more sleep.” 

Looking at the two of them there, curled together like children in the womb in the bleach-white medbay bed, he felt something twist and grow heavy in him. “Well – I don't want to wake him, I should - ”

“He won't wake,” she said quickly. “He's been sedated.” She bit her lip. “He – he told me some things,” she said. 

“Are you sure the truth drugs weren't still working?” Han answered, and he'd meant to stay angry but instead it came out wryly affectionate.

“I had them run a tox screen on him, just to be sure,” she said. “I hadn't realized – when I found out we were siblings, I naturally - ”

“You withdrew,” he said, thinking of that kiss on Hoth, but also of a hundred other smaller touches: Leia looping her arm through Luke's, standing on tiptoe to ruffle his hair, twining her fingers through his under briefing tables and mess benches. “You stopped touching him.” Leia's gaze sharpened and he admitted, “Yeah, he told me that one, when he was still coming down from the interrogation. Said I'd stopped doing it, too, around the same time, and I guess thinking back he was right. He just seemed so … untouchable, after the war.”

Leia looked down at Luke, bright head cuddled close against the curve of her thigh, and sighed heavily. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I tried, after Bespin, but - ”

The words seemed to catch in her throat. “But what?” he asked, pulling over a flimsy plastic chair to sit close by the bed, one of his knees knocking against Leia's outer calf, completing the circuit between the three of them.

“He scared me,” she admitted. “Han, he could _do things_ … it wasn't like him carrying that old saber, it was – ”

“Kid went and turned into a Jedi Knight,” Han said. “That when the damn 'keep calm' thing started up?”

Leia nodded. “And then he told me – Han, I don't think I've ever been so afraid in all my life – because he was saying that _Darth Vader_ was my father, but it was also a confession. He gave me this look, like he thought I was going to, to cast him out, or something. And he was going to confront Vader – it was suicide, I know it was, but how could I stop him?”

Memory tugged at the back of his mind. “He told you that on Endor? That night that you asked me to hold you, on the rope bridge?” She'd trembled in his arms, he remembered, and he'd been taken aback at the strength of her seemingly-sudden pain. He drew in a breath that whistled between his teeth. “Sithspit, I wonder if he did it on purpose,” he said. “Shock you and then take off, counting on you being too shaken to stop him.”

“I don't know,” Leia whispered. “But – I didn't want it to be true. I don't want it to be true. Vader hurt me with his force-powers, and to know that Luke's abilities come from the same source – that I've got it inside me too, and who knows what kind of unnatural things I've done without knowing it – it's a nightmare, Han, it's worse than a nightmare.”

“That's what Luke said, when they pumped him full of truth drugs,” Han said.

Maybe he should've left, when he saw that Leia was sitting there at Luke's side. Was he really up to facing another scene, so soon after the last one? But it looked like she was ready to talk, now, and somehow it felt good to say these things, to voice his awareness of how much things'd changed.

It wasn't Her Worshipfulness the Ice Princess sitting next to him, it was Leia: pretty, worried, melancholy Leia, who could play a mean hand of Sabacc if you could get her to lighten up and have some fun; clever, brave, passionate Leia who believed in truth and justice more fervently than Han had ever believed in anything in his whole life; sweet, lonely Leia who'd opened up to a smuggler and a farmboy without a second thought for the proprieties of the thing. 

The anger that had ridden him through the previous night was completely gone now, dissipated as though it had never been. She'd done a wrong thing keeping secrets from him, but she'd been hurt by it as much as Luke had. If Luke deserved his forgiveness and pity, so too did she. She had an equal share in the Skywalker family tragedy.

“You love him, don't you?” he asked, biting softly into his lower lip, trying to project nonchalance, to not care. Same question he'd asked her on Endor, as the remnants of the Death Star had streamed down around them like comets, but he got a different answer this time.

“Of course,” she said. “Don't you?”

Han sat silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Look, Princess, this is why the pair of you are supposed to tell me things. You need someone with the sense to tell you that blood is only thicker than water in the scientific sense.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

He put his hands up, seeking rhetorical balance in the shifting currents, remembering the feeling of a boat at sea moving unsteadily beneath his boyish feet. He'd managed Corellian oceans; Skywalkers shouldn't be too much of a challenge. It was high time he put this mess to rights. 

“Luke makes a big deal out of biological family. Always has, probably 'cause he's never had much of one. Kid started dreamin' dreams about his mama and daddy when he was just a little thing, you can tell. Carried that saber around like a talisman, even back when he couldn't use the thing worth a damn. So he finds out his daddy's a sith lord, and it gets to him pretty hard. Well, it would, wouldn't it?”

Leia nodded, said nothing, gestured with the hand that wasn't curled around Luke for him to go on.

“So that's Luke. But what about you? You had a father, Leia, I've heard you talk about him. He raised you to be a senator. You said once that he made you feel strong enough for anything. So why are you so torn up about this Darth Vader thing? Organa must have known about it. Wasn't he in cahoots with your mother on the rebellion?”

“I always knew he wasn't my birth father,” she said softly. “He wasn't married to mama. I guess I just never thought about it much.”

“You didn't need to,” Han said, gesturing expansively, working to hold his balance. “You had your mother, and then you had Organa and his lady, and everything was okay for you. Look, Leia, I did grow up with my biodad, and let me tell you, it's not an experience I'd recommend.”

She looked back up at him, latching onto that hint of information about the past he didn't often speak of. Well, he had all their darkest secrets now; turnabout was fair play. “My daddy was a small-time crook,” he said. “He was a spicer and a drunkard and when he was in his cups he smacked my ma around, and me too if he could catch me. I haven't had word of him in more'n twenty years now, and I couldn't care less if the old parasite's died off. But it doesn't matter, because I might be his get but I'm not him. I don't have to carry his sins around on my back, just because he contributed some DNA to my cause.”

“It's different with us, though,” she said. “It's not just DNA, it's this – this power, these abilities. Luke talked to me, a little, about the two sides of the Force, and we're, we're the children of the dark side of that power, Han, how can that not matter?”

In her lap, Luke sighed and turned over, pressing his face down into her lap. She froze momentarily at his movement, and Han held still too until it became clear that Luke wasn't going to exit sleep any time soon. 

“I don't know. Just that – you both kept all these secrets from me, thinking they'd matter, and now I know, but they don't matter. The only thing that bothers me is the keeping of them.”

She looked down, forlorn. “Hey,” he added, “I love you, too, you know. No matter who your daddy is.”

That, at least, won him a wry smile. And, when they were ready to leave and go eat, they went together. It was good, the reassuring press of Leia's kisses, the slight weight of her body beside his in his narrow bunk through the night.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note the bumped rating! There's an explicit sex scene toward the end of this chapter.

The next day, Han knew the time had come to face up to the rest of his punishment when he got a message that Luke was awake, and asking for him. 

When he made it back to the medcenter, he found Luke sitting up in bed, eyes open and alert and flinty-clear. “Han,” he said, impenetrable reserve encasing him like plate armor. 

“Hey, kid,” Han answered, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, not sure how to proceed. Should he mention what Luke'd told him, or was the kid going to try to pretend it hadn't happened? 

“I guess I owe you, again,” Luke said, mock-joking, but with no real humor in his tone.

Decision made, Han pulled over a nearby chair and sat, knees wide and hands open. He wasn't going to let Luke start with denial. Something good was going to come of this clusterfuck if he had to die or kill for it. “Yeah,” he said, “but not for the reason you're thinking. Coming after your ass is something I do for free, kid, but getting blindsided by you isn't in my contract.”

A hand clutched at his knee, and it took him a moment to figure out which one it was, the fleshly limb or the mechanical. 

It was the mechanical, and he couldn't suppress a shudder. Evidently Luke had gotten a new prosthesis put into place; Han could still see the control panel limned on his wrist underneath the loose robe he wore.

This would never do. He'd come to mend the situation, and instead he was jumping like a startled bantha.

“Sorry,” he said, meeting Luke's eyes and letting his sincerity show all the way. “I don't have a problem with your prosthetic. I just – you never told me about the injury in the first place, so it's been kind of a lot to adjust to.”

That got Luke to drop his eyes in shame. “No,” Han said, reaching out to raise his chin again, “it's okay. Let's move forward, not back. We all have our war wounds, kid. I've got plenty of scars of my own, as you know all too well.”

“I'm sorry, too,” Luke said. “I didn't – I never started out with the intention to lie to you. It surprised me, how unwell you were after we got you back on Tatooine. Ought not to have done – I've known what a Hutt can be capable of all my life – but it was you, Han, and I'd never seen you brought low like that before, not really. I maybe didn't handle it as well as I could have done. I didn't know how to open up to you, and still do what I had to do, to end the war once and for all.”

“So now – what do you want to do with your peace? You won it, Luke, I'm only now understanding at what cost. You can have wants and needs, you know. Now that it's all over.”

“What if – what if what I covet belongs to another?”

“What if that's not so?” And Han leaned in, then, and gently, softly, tentatively kissed Luke's startled mouth.

“I won't harm Leia,” Luke said, drawing back. 

“It's okay,” Han answered, hands reaching out to caress and enfold, “she knows. We're going to work it out, kid, we're going to work it all out now. Tell me what you want, Luke baby.”

“You,” Luke said, eyes fluttering closed, then open, cheekbones pinking, “I want you. And,” he admitted with a heavier swallow, “her.”

“Yeah,” Han breathed. “That sounds about right.”

“I don't want it to be a secret,” Luke said.

“It might need to be,” Han hedged, mind racing. “You've told too many people that you're siblings, for one thing. Hmm, that's why you've stayed private about Vader, too, isn't it? To keep from implicating Leia, through her connection to you.”

“It's not ideal,” Luke admitted. “But I wouldn't have her reputation tainted, not for anything. Being connected to me is one thing – to him, though? I can see why she wants to hide the truth.”

“Living too much of a lie isn't healthy, Luke.”

“I know, I know. You were just saying we should keep things between us quiet, though.”

“Look, one way or another, we can work this out. If we have to run away together to some rock on the Outer Rim, I'll plot the course. I think people won't press to hard about close family and friends; everyone knows we're connected, the three of us. We just won't give them all the sordid details about how.”

“We should really talk to Leia about all this,” Luke said with a laugh. Sobering, he added, “the thing is, in an ideal world, I'd say I want my father, too, and my name, on top of being with you, and her. I'm a selfish creature, aren't I?”

“Not selfish, just unusually over-burdened with, ah, gifts and inheritances.”

“That's one way to put it!”

“Better too much than too little, Luke, any man can tell you that.”

*

They looked at each other from opposite corners of Leia's grand stateroom bed; she, wrapped protectively in a duvet, Luke curled up half-hidden in a pile of pillows, and Han left to kick his heels at the foot of the bed, too awkward to take off his robe and slippers.

It was the newness of the thing, Han decided, that made it so cursedly awkward and difficult. It was like being a teenager again. He could learn to hate it. Damned idiot Skywalkers.

“You both understand, for no other beings in the galaxy would I consider this amount of fussing around before getting on with going to bed worth the hassle? Come on, relax. I know for a fact that both of you have done this before.”

Luke laughed, and Leia uncurled a little, so he counted it a victory. He even started to feel like he could relax himself.

“Leia,” Luke asked, venturesomely, “can I take down your braids?”

“You can,” she said, shifting nearer, so that he could reach gentle fingers up into the chestnut coils of her abundant hair. “If you want to.”

“You looked so pretty with your hair loose, on the Forest Moon,” Luke said wistfully. “I wanted to protect you, and keep you that carefree forever.”

Leia laughed at him. “If I looked carefree, it was just on the surface,” she said. “I never forgot for a moment that we were waging a war. And I was terribly worried about you, I'll have you know; I just didn't want you to feel bothered, so I was trying to give you space.”

“Luke,” Han said, also shifting closer and reaching out to grab Luke's prosthetic wrist, “take off that wrap on your arm. I'm not gonna lie to you, kid, it spooked me when I realized you had a prosthetic. But I want you to see that _your hands_ don't spook me. Let me see the thing, and I'll get used to it.”

“I always thought of it as a miraculous thing,” Leia murmured, tracing the join where Luke's skin met his technological parts. “A miracle that you survived, a miracle that I found you, a miracle that the med-techs could give you back so much of what you'd lost.” She took ahold of the hand, and drew the fingers up to her lips to kiss. Luke sighed and shuddered as the sensations reached and registered in his brain.

“Leia,” he moaned, as she slid one of his fingertips into her mouth.

“We grieve with you, for the loss,” Han said hoarsely, sliding in behind them to wrap an arm around Luke's back, holding his body close. “We're grateful you're still here.”

“I'm – grateful to be here,” Luke choked out, leaning back into Han's embrace. 

“Stay here, then,” Han said, and pulled his neck back to kiss him thoroughly, while Leia went to work teasing at the waistline of Luke's soft sleep pants. “We've got you right where we want you.”

“Whatever happens, Luke,” Leia whispered, and Luke turned his face to meet her gaze. “Let's meet it together.” She tugged at his pants, working them down until Luke was bare to the knee. “Just the three of us.”

She slid her wet mouth down over the stiff length of Luke's erect cock, and Luke moaned and pressed back against Han's torso, one of his arms back behind his neck in Han's control, the other buried in Leia's long, loose hair. As he bucked and twisted, Han let his own erection frot against Luke's bared bottom, not making to enter him, just engaging in some friendly pleasurable friction.

Han completely ruined his cool, though, when Leia brought Luke off in her mouth, and the kid spasmed and flailed and made these _noises_ in Han's lap, and Han found himself grabbing Luke around the middle and coming so hard he saw stars.

When he made it back to consciousness, he found Luke taking care of Leia's needs with a smiling, lazy tongue, the two of them all wrapped up in each other again.

“Well,” he harrumphed, “glad you kids had fun without me.”

“Take the time you need to recover, old man,” Leia jibed cheerfully, her face glowing and pink with satisfaction and pleasure. “We're willing to let you catch up.”

“Things could really get complicated, you know,” Han cautioned them, not sure which one he was mostly addressing the concern to.

“As if they aren't already,” Luke drawled, eyes half-lidded.

“Yeah,” Han agreed, and they snoozed together awhile in thoughtful almost-contentment.

Han was the one to break the silence, again. He feared that might be his predestinate role in whatever weird three-way relationship this was turning out to be. “Luke, will you tell us about what you did on Bescane? Before I got to you, what happened to you there?”

“Oh,” Luke said, rousing a little, “all right. I want a little water first. Thirsty, you two?”

Sitting up again in bed, glasses cupped in their hands, they listened to their lover speak.

“Before I was captured – it was actually kind of a triumph. Our intel was good, Leia, and I found once I had my hands on their weapon that I could unmake it in the Force, just as I could use the Force to make energy, or light. I could dissipate the bonds that held their molecules together, just by focusing my will. I understand if you don't want to follow the Jedi path, but you should really let me show you how to do some of these things, it's just amazing.”

“They caught you, all the same,” Han interjected.

“It was a choice between getting myself, and taking out a bioweapon that could've led to millions of deaths,” Luke murmured. “And,” he added, looking up to hold their eyes, dark brown and hazel, with his own pale blue ones, “I knew you'd come for me. I just had to survive until I was found. I tried to get the message out, to let you know where I was.”

“I don't like you trying to sacrifice yourself like that,” Han told him.

“But he didn't,” Leia said, surprising both men. “Han, you rescued him, just as he knew you would.”

“So I'm on the hook for every damn-fool idealistic tear Luke takes off on, now?”

“You know you are,” Leia said.

“Not like it's new,” Luke added with an apologetic shrug.

“No,” Han admitted, cracking a wry smile. “It's not new at all.”


End file.
